KS Napoleon Mod 1.26 & KS Sprites 1.05 Released

New versions of the KS Napoleon Mod and the KS Sprites Mod are avaialable.  The links are in the first post of the  Set Up for SOWWL Napoleon Games For Kriegspiel style thread.

Numerous changes to the AI have been made. These include:
Cavalry is much smarter in its approach towards the enemy.  It will also do a better job in moving away from squares.
Infantry brigades now will tend to deploy and fight with three battalions in the front line.  Historically, brigades would only fight with 2 or 3 battalions at a time, (1 regiment at a time).
When AI brigades get into trouble, (lightening bolt above the brigade commander's head), the brigade will detatch itself and withdraw from combat.  This is an attempt to prevent the AI from fighting till the last man.
Skirmish units, sometimes multiple battalions will deploy automatically.  Once the fight is joined by other battalions from the brigade, these skirmishers will revert to a closed formation.
A few units will only fight in skirmish order as they did historically.  These include Austrian jagers, Bavarian jagers, British rifles, Portuguese cacadores, Prussian jagers, Russian jagers, Saxon jagers, Spanish miquelets and Wurttemburg jagers.

Buildings on the Spain Antietam 1 and PCL 1, France Cold Harbor and Manassas, Belgium Wavre maps now have buildings which can be fortified.

New sprites for Austrian artillery horse teams, Russian foot and horse cavalry, Russian guard Cossacks, French foot and horse guard artillery, French bi-corn infantry have been added.

Bravo Uncle Billy. Looks like a lot of good work here.

I particularly like the idea of getting the AI brigade commanders to disengage. Can this idea be extended to division and corps at some point?

Who did the new sprites btw?

Martin (J)

Remus, a.k.a Jim Davey, did has been doing our sprites for awhile now.

The withdrawal from combat could be extended to divisions, although a different triggering mechanism would need to be implemented.

That sounds promising. A couple more questions:

1. Does the brigade commander's aggression rating impact on whether he pulls back?

2. Do I take it we don't have access to the corps (and army) bit of the code as yet? It would be good to fight a game where the AI at some point might to decide to conduct a withdrawal. Or am I being unrealistic?

Martin (J)

A "lightning bolt?" Does someone see himself as Zeus?

Theoretically it is possible to make a corps or even an army pull back. The difficult part would be coming up with the criteria for such a decision. For a brigade it is simple; when the sum of morale of all the regiments of brigade is less than the value of the number of regiments * 5 it will leave the field. For larger units, the criteria would need to be more nuanced. If you can come up with such a rule(s), I can try to implement it.

Will give it some thought. Perhaps we can chat about it next time we're both on T/S.

Martin (J)

Our playtests have been using this formula for some time, correct? In which case I haven't noticed much, if any difference. Could we try adjusting this value to make the brigades more brittle so they withdraw sooner? I still feel that too many of our AI opponents are fighting until they are destroyed and several of our games have Borodino-like levels of losses.

Yes, we've been using it for more than a month. It is most noticeable in the replay viewer. You'll see some units abandoning the field. It is also reported in the log file. Often, however, a unit which is withdrawing, runs into another firefight . Since the withdrawal orders only come three times during a period of ~ 8-10 minutes, it will often keep fighting until the bitter end. This effect is largely due to the reaction distance the unit has been given, via the commander's stance. It is impossible to change the stance via the code we have access to.